Jane Mace
From LiteracyTentWiki
In the mid-1980s, Jane Mace and Ruth Lesirge, community adult literacy educators from London, visited Boston, Massachusetts in the U.S., and presented workshops on community writing and publishing. Their first workshop was sponsored by a community-based organization then called Jobs for Youth (now JFYNetworks). Their second visit was sponsored by the Adult Literacy Resource Institute. In both workshops they talked about and gave examples of some exciting (then) new work in community publishing, that is, publishing the writings of adults who were learning to read and write. In the second visit they talked about weekend writing retreats where women students, many of whom had not traveled outside their communities, went to an attractive rural location and spent the weekend together writing.
The staff of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute, Barbara Neumann, James E. Roberts, and David J. Rosen in particular, thought this was a good idea for adult learners in Boston. This visit by Lesirge and Mace was the inspiration for a multi-year adventure, jointly sponsored by the ALRI and the Public Library of Brookline, Massachusetts, and known as the Publishing for Literacy project. Led by James E. Roberts, the project created a new literary magazine. The student editorial board chose to call it a "literary", not "literacy" magazine because they wanted the magazine, named by them Need I Say More, to be an outlet for adult new writer creative writing.
The project sponsored several (both female and male) adult new writer weekend writing retreats at the Woolman Hill farm in Western Massachusetts and on Thompson's Island in the Boston Harbor. It sponsored Writers in the Classroom in which some of those published in the Need I Say More magazine went to adult literacy education classes to read and talk about their creative writing. As its last creative adventure, the project sponsored a series of student-improvised dramas, published in a volume called Setting the Stage for Literacy
Copies of Need I Say More, and Setting the Stage for Literacy are available from the SABES Library at http://sabes.org/resources/index.htm For more information contact SABES Librarian, Sandra Darling.
For more information about this project contact David J. Rosen, djrosen%comcast.net (replace % with @)
Return to Creativity_and_Innovation
